Jennet Thomas’ first exhibition at Matt’s Gallery, All Suffering SOON TO END!, comprises narrative film and installation which incorporates sculpture, sound and performance.

Thomas has reconstructed the gallery into two interconnecting chambers. The first is the Dark Chamber in which a 30 minute film plays continuously. Escalating into a series of surprising and rhythmic variations, the film depicts a number of elaborate parallel worlds which become increasingly absurd and disturbing.

The second Purple Chamber entered only through the first, houses a further alternate world, theatrically enclosed in purple tickertape tinsel. Key motifs depicted in the film are exaggerated and distorted—as if by centuries of mistranslation—into sculptural and sound installations, inhabited on occasion by performative presences.

Thomas takes a contemporary evangelical pamphlet as her inspiration. The pamphlet describes the ‘the end of days,’ and is both tender and lyrical in part, then suddenly savagely violent and ridiculous.

An imagined characterisation of the pamphlet’s author acts as the film’s main protagonist. This passionate and sinister Purple Preacher is a conflation of fundamentalist preacher and cartoon super villain from 60s and 70s Marvel comics, The Purple Man, whose superpower lies in his ability to instantly convince and persuade. Calling at the comfortable home of an elderly suburban couple the Purple Preacher uses his sinister allure on the unwitting residents. A hypnotic slide show, life-sized Adam and Eve rubber dolls, a visit from a mysterious green nun, a disconcerting trip to a miniature model village in which perfect and parallel imperfect worlds are portrayed, and an impromptu gig in the garage, are amongst the surreal tools the preacher employs to illustrate his sermon, whilst unwittingly foretelling his own destruction.

At moments sinister and disturbing whilst at others charming and enchanting, this mesmerizing world of surreal repetition bombards the senses. A speculative exploration into cultural forms of ‘belief’ and representation, this darkly comic work satirizes the persuasive rhetoric of fanaticism, and begs the question: